15 December 2007

Now that my semester is over, I've gotten the chance to catch up on my backlog of things to read and watch...
At OSCON 2007, Simon Peyton-Jones gave a really nice 3 hour introduction to Haskell (original post). The video has two parts along with PDF slides:

Definitely lengthy, but worthwhile. Simon's apparently an animated presenter and the audience asks interesting questions. I've futzed a bit with Haskell since I read about Haskell Curry every time I passed the McAllister building on Penn State's campus. The Penn State math library had a pretty good Haskell intro which I enjoyed, but I've never gotten the chance to do anything "useful" with the language besides learn from it.
In Java, most of the immutable type and functor-like patterns I use are taken from concepts I learned from Haskell. A side-effect-less style (where possible) combined with short methods and good entry/exit tracing makes it easy to debug server side code from a single trace log.